Jun 8, 2021
Disclaimer: I watched the English dub version of this season. I have never watched a Gundam series or film before this one. I generally enjoy sci-fi, space, war/military, combat/fighting, and mecha themes in fiction.
Going into this, I expected it to be fairly solid. Even though I have never watched a Gundam series before, I've certainly been aware of the property. It's been around forever, and it's widely known and very popular. It also tends to get rated well. But after watching season 1 of Mobile Suit Gundam 00, I find myself with no desire to watch season 2, and very little curiosity about any other
...
Gundam series if this is representative of what they have to offer.
I'm struggling to think about any general category this show did well. Art, character, story, dialogue, combat, sound... nothing stood out as exceptional or praiseworthy. In fact, I'd say very few things about this show even managed to be average.
Admittedly, I thought the start of the season wasn't too shabby. It had me interested in seeing where they were going with the story they had laid out, and how it would unfold and be revealed. But that didn't last long. The more they extended the story through the episodes, the more convoluted, confusing, and seemingly random it became. By the end, if it weren't for characters literally and incessantly reciting a brief, paraphrased version of a synopsis for no apparent reason other than shouty exposition, one might have actually forgotten what the story was supposed to be. That being said, the story did have a beginning, middle, and end, but it wasn't particularly satisfying, and it was filled with so many subplots, unexplained story elements, and plot twists that it eventually became a real chore just to get to the final episode, if for no other reason than completionism.
By the end, there are so many elements of the story that are never adequately explained or properly defined that it makes what little story there has been seem all the more confusing, despite how basic and straightforward the core of the story is. At some point toward the middle and into the end of the season, things just seemingly start randomly happening because they need to to get to where the story wants to go, but the show doesn't adequately explain how or why these things happen.
I don't have much to say about the art or animation. It wasn't terrible, but it's nothing special. I was expecting eye candy, but this show didn't deliver. It was all very basic looking. There's nothing technically wrong with any of it, but I just found it all fairly meh-worthy. I was similarly quite underwhelmed with the battle scenes, which never managed to bring me anywhere near the edge of my seat or invoke much tension or excitement at all. There was a distinct lack of awe that should follow from watching what are supposed to technologically incredible mechs firing laser beams and swinging swords around in space.
I think the sound contributed to how underwhelming the battle scenes were, too. Nothing sounded immersive. It was just generic pew-pew effects you've heard a million times before. The music wasn't anything noteworthy. And the dialogue, at least in the dub, was often mind-numbingly annoying.
I know it's sort of a common trope in anime to have characters evoke a sense of meaning or emotion by randomly stating proper nouns, or by book-ending scenes with stating proper nouns, but it seems like nearly half of one of the MC's dialogue here is nothing but this, as if the guy physically can't formulate complete sentences, and it's just so overused here it becomes grating. I suppose it would help if the character had anything of value to actually say, but he's so 2-dimensional, monotonous, and bland that I guess he has the depth of a inflatable pool.
There's not a lot of character depth in general with any of the other characters either. There's clearly and attempt here and there, and even some successful moments where depth and growth are delivered to some extent, but they are few and far between. There's too many characters getting focus (many of which are entirely unnecessary), and not enough depth to flesh any of them out very well, including the main cast. Of the main protagonist cast, everyone who has any semblance of a backstory has some kind of tragic past which is varying degrees of nebulous, often delivered by exposition or replaying the same few-second flashback clips over and over, and they all have their own personalities. I will give them that--that their personalities are at least fairly distinct from one another. But a good sense of their motivations or the reason they're doing the things they're doing is all rather phoned in and never really explored or defined with much substance.
As for the villains, they're nothing short of comical. That's hardly something that's unique to this show, but it doesn't make it any better. One of the two primary villains is "I want to destroy and remake the world in my image for reasons" and the other is "I like war for reasons." That's it. That's basically all there is to them. With the former, almost nothing about how he becomes involved in or achieves anything is explained--he's just kind there, and his achievements just kinda happen off screen. The latter just seems like your generic sadistic villain, who delights in causing suffering just because that's the way he is, or at least, that's what we're left to assume since we're given no explanation for why he might be the way he is.
There's a few other relatively minor antagonists, protagonists, and side characters, some of whom inexplicably get a lot of screen time that comes off as nothing but unnecessary and often pointless filler, and the rest of whom appear to be nothing beyond plot devices who are disposed with as quickly as they came into the story.
Anyway, overall I rate this a 3.
Reviewer’s Rating: 3
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